The painful, the amazing, the brilliant, the hideous….all of it is valuable and necessary to become who we desire to be.

We’ve got to be willing to go through it all too- not just bear it. We need to milk it, dig at it, peel away the layers of it, and taste it….every single glorious little morsel of it.

It’s easy to make excuses and back away, shut the windows of our souls, or at least allow them to fog up when we’re not paying attention. If we want to eliminate our personally created barriers, however, we’ve got to illuminate what we’re using to build them.

What are we blocking our paths with? What are the words we hear that stunt our growth and minimize our talents?

Once you take the time to shed light on these walls, then you can move forward in replacing them with committed and deliberate, intense, and purposeful movement down a well-lit path of resilience and healthy vulnerability.

When do you find that you get most lost in your self? When are those times when you get a real, candid, honest look at who you are and acknowledge that it’s pretty dang ugly sometimes? I want to know! Because we all have those moments. You’re not alone. Maybe sharing them would relieve some of the disgust or fear we have about what we’re assuming no one else experiences.

You don’t have to lack confidence. You don’t have to fear what you assume others might be thinking about you. You don’t have to struggle with overwhelming anxiety. You don’t have to battle food or the scale. But you have to want something different and be willing to till and water the dirt if you want new seeds to grow.